14 DAY TRIAL // The Chairman of Sony Corp., Howard Stringer, says that one of the top priorities for the electronics giant is "to restore profitability in our television and game businesses" because these two sub divisions of the company are the ones that lost money last year.
The comments regarding the games division of Sony were made during a meeting with shareholders in Tokyo. This was the introduction for the announcement of a new business plan for the medium term.
Sony projects that the current year will see the games division turning up a profit for the first time in three years and since the PlayStation 3 gaming platform was launched. The loss suffered by Sony through its games division in just two years amounts to a staggering 3.4 billion dollars.
The current forecast is saying that the games division is set to sell more than 10 million PlayStation 3 consoles during 2008 while some 9 million older generation PlayStation 2 consoles will also reach users. The installed base of the gaming device is set to expand slower than that of the rival Nintendo Wii, which is projected to sell some 25 million units in the same time frame. The Xbox 360 is expected to sell at toughly the same rhythm as the Sony made console.
2008 is considered to be a profitable year for the games division because the production costs of the PS3 are falling constantly even as sales are beginning to pick up the pace. The company also has a very strong autumn and winter line-up of games, some of them exclusively for the PlayStation 3, which will bring in more revenue than the 2007 line up. One of the biggest titles of the year, the long waited Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, has just been released and PlayStation 3 sales in Japan have jumped by more than 60,000 units as a result.
This will surely please Stringer, but he will want to see better performance from the PS3 before declaring the current gen console a commercial success.